Despite Obama’s Call, No Rush in R.O.T.C.’s Return to Campus

In his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, President Obama called for college campuses to “open their doors to our military recruiters” and the Reserve Officer Training Corps.

This would have been an explosive statement with wide ramifications 40 years ago, at the height of the Vietnam War, but in today’s context, it is basically symbolic. The hostility between universities, many of them now dependent on federal funding, and the military, with the draft long over, is much diminished.

Military recruiters have already been on most college campuses for years. And since Congress last month repealed “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the policy that banned gay men and lesbians from serving openly in the military, most of the elite universities with no R.O.T.C. programs have indicated that they are prepared to bring the military onto campus.

But that is no guarantee that such programs will materialize. For one thing, the military has limited resources for new R.O.T.C. units. For another, the level of student interest is extremely low, with no more than 10 to 20 students at these campuses participating in nearby R.O.T.C. programs now, though that could change if units were more convenient to campus.

“New schools or universities interested in R.O.T.C. programs will each be evaluated” with an eye toward “the most efficient use of these resources,” Cynthia Smith, a spokeswoman for the Pentagon, said Wednesday.

Diane Mazur, a law professor at the University of Florida, a former Air Force officer and author of “A More Perfect Military,” said: “I would be the most surprised person in the world if the military came back to Harvard or Yale. The military doesn’t have the staffing or the funding, and it’s very expensive to start a new R.O.T.C. detachment.”

She added: “Both sides have to dance to make it work, and the military isn’t in a position to expand these programs.”

The Pentagon says that only two schools — Vermont Law School in South Royalton, Vt., and William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul — have barred military recruiters.

But as soon as Mr. Obama and the military certify the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” Vermont and William Mitchell will allow recruiters on campus, spokesman for both said on Wednesday. It is not clear when that might happen, but Mr. Obama said in his speech that he expected it to occur “this year.”

At the same time, the elite Ivy colleges that resisted the military in the 1960s and 1970s now say they are ready to welcome R.O.T.C. units.

Shortly after “don’t ask, don’t tell” was repealed, Drew Faust, the president of Harvard, said in a statement: “I look forward to pursuing discussions with military officials and others to achieve Harvard’s full and formal recognition of R.O.T.C.”

Richard Levin, Yale’s president, said last month that the university was “eager to open discussions about expanding opportunities for students interested in military service.”

Stanford has formed an ad hoc faculty committee that is considering whether to expand its relationship with the military. The committee, which met Tuesday night as Mr. Obama delivered his speech, is expected to make its recommendations in a couple of months.

Columbia has formed a task force on military engagement. Ron Mazor, co-chairman of the task force and a student at Columbia Law School, said Wednesday that town-hall-style meetings would start next month, as would a student survey on attitudes toward the military. He said the results would be reported to the university senate, of which he is a member, by March 4.

Lee Bollinger, Columbia’s president, said in an earlier statement that repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” “effectively ends what has been a vexing problem for higher education, including at Columbia, given our desire to be open to our military, but not wanting to violate our own core principle against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.”

But the universities were forced to carve out exceptions to that policy in the late-1990s and early 2000s, when Congress, backed by the Supreme Court, denied them federal money if they spurned military recruiters. They stood to lose hundreds of millions of dollars, not just in defense grants but from across the federal government. (Vermont has lost about $500,000 a year in grants, a spokesman said, and William Mitchell simply did not compete for certain grants so did not actually lose money, said Eric Janus, its president and dean.)

As for the R.O.T.C. programs, the Pentagon said it had “disestablished” its units on certain military campuses at the height of the Vietnam War. Ms. Mazur, the law professor, said: “The services made the decision, in an era of downsizing, not to adapt their course content or increase the qualifications of instructors in an effort to meet university requirements,” and so they left.

“It wasn’t worth it to the military to wrestle with these campuses” over the academic qualifications, Ms. Mazur said. Instead, the military established R.O.T.C. units at one centrally located university and allowed students from nearby universities to attend. Students at Harvard, for example, participate in the R.O.T.C. program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; students at Columbia go to Fordham.

The military says that at this point, it has 489 R.O.T.C. units with “cross-town arrangements” with 2,400 universities, allowing almost every student in the country access to a program.

As the universities now move toward recognizing R.O.T.C. programs, they still may hit a snag. Some students are arguing that even with the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the military still does not meet the antidiscrimination requirements of the universities because it bars people who are transgender.

At Stanford, Alok Vaid-Menon, a sophomore and president of Stanford Students for Queer Liberation, said his group wanted to keep R.O.T.C. off the campus, though still allow students to participate in programs at nearby campuses, until the military accepted transgender students. He said that he had tried to raise support for this view from students at other universities but that the response so far had been “bleak.”

Mr. Vaid-Menon said there were about 10 transgender students at Stanford, which he said was about the same number of those involved in R.O.T.C.